Future ruin: Can we design our way out of eco-crisis?

IN FRIENDLY competition with Percy Bysshe Shelley, the poet Horace Smith once wrote a poem entitled Ozymandias. Shelley’s version is the one we remember, but Smith’s is compelling for another reason. He imagines a hunter traipsing through the ruins of a future London. Lighting upon a fragment of a monument, he “stops to guess/What powerful but unrecorded race/Once dwelt in that annihilated place”.

This year’s Designs of the Year competition has its monumental moments, but even the most grandiloquent of the 76 entries at least tips its hat to the idea that Earth will not sustain another great ruin, or may even end up as our next great ruin, unless we respond more cleverly to our environment.

Jean Nouvel’s One Central Park in Sydney, Australia, towers above its competitors, literally. Clad in climbing plants by Patrick Blanc, the leading designer of vertical gardens, the building’s overriding purpose seems to be as an apology for its very existence. There is even a motorised heliostat mounted on a cantilever near the roof, to erase its shadow. The arrangement looks terrifying in photographs, suggesting the 50-metre-high moontowers of 19th-century experiments with civic lighting.

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In Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City, a project called House for Trees eschews apology for action, albeit eccentrically. Here, high-density living units double as gigantic containers for tropical trees. Come the rains, a sufficient number of these properties could reduce the risk of urban flooding. At least, so claim architects Vo Trong Nghia, although it sounds like special pleading to me – an alibi for the strange green dream they are weaving, of wandering lost among giant plant pots.

Where rains are few, a more down-to-earth aesthetic holds sway. PITCHAfrica’s Waterbank Campus is a 10-acre school site in Laikipia, Kenya, where 4 acres of irrigated conservation agriculture are fed by seven low-cost buildings, designed to collect and store what little precipitation there is.

PITCHAfrica’s vision extends beyond unassuming architecture to providing resources like clean water, food and sanitation on-site for its students, in the hope they will spread the word about how to manage scarce resources at home.

This vision of a built “ecosystem capable of empowering and transforming communities” is shared by a great many of the show’s “technical fix” entries. Take the Blue Diversion toilet. This project, led by the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is an all-in-one sanitation, fertiliser, drinking-water and biogas solution. In this cheap, ugly, blue plastic toilet, nothing is wasted – not even sunlight&colon; there is a small solar panel on its roof.

Other ideas plug in to attempts to improve city life. Take Peru’s University of Engineering and Technology in Lima, where researchers have invented a billboard that purifies the air in a five-block radius, scrubbing it clean of construction dust and 99 per cent of airborne bacteria – normally the work of 1200 trees, says the team.

Another entry, The Ocean Cleanup, designed by Erwin Zwart with Boyan Slat and Jan de Sonneville, tackles the plastic garbage in the world’s oceans. Why not string barriers over the waves to catch the plastic as it circulates? Having raised over &dollar;2 million through crowdfunding, the organisation is planning large-scale pilots.

This is technical fixery at its purest. It doesn’t prevent the oceans being littered&colon; it is an environmental sticking plaster, permitting us to pursue business as usual. But why should designers carry the whole world on their shoulders? Designs like these could be part of a broader, political solution. The Ocean Cleanup’s barriers would be a fitting monument for our descendants to puzzle over.

Better to avoid collapse entirely, but it won’t be easy. It is simpler for designers to ameliorate or disguise problems, rather than address them head on. It is next to impossible to imagine how we get from a wasteful here to a sustainable there. This is why, for me, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg’s Designing for the Sixth Extinction is the exhibition’s posterchild. In her design fiction, Ginsberg has anatomised the ultimate disruptive enterprise, in which “nature is totally industrialized for the benefit of society”.

It is simpler for designers to ameliorate or disguise problems, rather than address them head on

Although her synthetic creatures are deliciously creepy (especially the “biologically-powered mobile soil bioremediation device”), it is her business model of saving our civilisation at the expense of the natural world while replacing it with something better that is fascinating. If Ginsberg’s vision comes to pass, our descendants won’t puzzle at our monuments. Our monuments will be everywhere, all around them and inside them.